Swire Coca-Cola Hall
Swire Coca-Cola
Hong Kong
Coca-Cola was created on 8 May 1886 in Atlanta, Georgia, in the United States — a drink concocted by an American pharmacist. Its trademark was registered in 1893, and by 1928 imported stock was officially on sale in Hong Kong.
It is said that in the early days Coca-Cola was distributed in Hong Kong by Watsons. But at the time Watsons’ own soft drinks outsold Coca-Cola of America, and the company’s history and scale were greater too, so Coca-Cola was little more than a sideline with modest sales.
The Coca-Cola Company in America therefore decided to hand development of the Hong Kong market to American merchants who had come to Hong Kong from Shanghai, and plans were drawn up for a Hong Kong bottling plant. The bottling business was inseparable from the sugar-refining industry then dominated by Swire, since the principal ingredients of soft drinks are sugar and water — and the Hong Kong bottling plant was built on the very site of the Taikoo Sugar Refinery, with the Taikoo reservoir in the hills behind it.
In 1948, Hong Kong Bottlers (香港汽水廠) began producing Coca-Cola, becoming the franchised bottler in Hong Kong of this household-name drink. So why is this hall called the “Swire Coca-Cola Hall” rather than the “Coca-Cola Hall”?
Because in 1965 the Swire group succeeded in acquiring Hong Kong Bottlers, taking over the bottling franchise, and in 1974 renamed it “Swire Bottlers Limited”. It then rolled out extensive distribution and marketing across Hong Kong, making Coca-Cola the drinks brand every Hong Kong person knows today.
The bottling plants
Swire Coca-Cola HK formerly produced Coca-Cola at plants in Lai Chi Kok, Tsuen Wan and Quarry Bay. Swire’s entry into the Coca-Cola bottling business began with its 1965 purchase of the bottling plant at Lai Chi Kok. Later, in 1991, the bottling plant at Siu Lek Yuen, Sha Tin officially opened — 143 metres tall, with 18 storeys, it remains to this day the tallest bottling plant of the Coca-Cola Company anywhere in the world.
In the 1970s, Coca-Cola in glass bottles was already hugely popular. And alongside that brand, childhood memories also call up Sprite, Fanta and Schweppes cream soda, together with Hi-C lemon tea, all introduced in the late 1970s.
The 1-litre economy bottle, first launched in Hong Kong in 1977, had a resealable cap that kept the fizz in the drink.
In the 1980s, as Hong Kong’s economy took off, customers’ demand for drinks grew larger still. In Hong Kong we could buy new products of the day such as Diet Coke and Bonaqua mineralised water. After the millennium, Hong Kong became the first place outside the American market to launch lemon-flavoured Diet Coke — followed later by the sugar-free Coca-Cola Zero, the tea range Authentic Tea House (淳｡茶舍) and the herbal-drinks brand Healthworks (健康工房).
Swire Coca-Cola HK thus became an indispensable part of Hong Kong culture, and the brand’s product range diversified. By 2020, Swire Coca-Cola HK was Hong Kong’s largest manufacturer of non-alcoholic drinks, with many brands everyone knows well — including Sprite, Fanta, Bonaqua and Aquarius — and a total annual output of more than 60 million cases.
Swire 太古
A note on the Swire group:
Swire is itself a famous Hong Kong brand, with highly diversified businesses. In any supermarket you can buy Taikoo Sugar; in Admiralty there is Pacific Place (太古廣場); and there are Taikoo Shing (太古城), Taikoo Place (太古坊) in Quarry Bay, even an MTR station named Tai Koo (太古站), with the Taikoo Primary School nearby. The history of Taikoo Shing is fascinating in its own right: the estate stands on the former site of the Taikoo Dockyard, run in those days by Butterfield & Swire, and at Cityplaza (太古城中心) today you can still see the stone tablet from that era.
Just as many people never notice that Coca-Cola is connected with the Swire group, so too Cathay Pacific, Cathay Dragon and HK Express are all aviation businesses under the Swire group. Which is why, as you may have noticed, Cathay aircraft carry the Swire group logo on their fuselages.
The evolution of the logo and slogans
The evolution of the Coca-Cola trademark (logo) and advertising slogans:
The evolution of the Coca-Cola logo and its slogans also traces the stages of the brand’s development and the changing times. From the late 19th century into the early 20th, Coca-Cola was simply a new choice of drink, and the slogan was “Drink Coca-Cola / 請飲可口可樂”. By the 1960s, slogans such as “things go better with Coke” and “It’s the real thing” showed that Coca-Cola’s advertising had turned to touching customers’ emotions.
After Coca-Cola’s centenary, the slogan became “Always Coca-Cola / 永遠是可口可樂”, giving the brand an evergreen feel. Recent slogans such as “open happiness” and “taste the feeling” play up feelings of joy and refreshment.
Coca-Cola holds happy memories for many Hong Kong people. Beyond the refreshing lift of the drink itself, many of Coca-Cola’s promotional campaigns became an indispensable part of daily life. In the era before mobile internet and QR codes, bottle-cap liners and ring-pulls from drink cans were the essential tools of lucky-draw games. Peeling back a cap liner to redeem a yo-yo, a twisty puzzle snake, a kickboard or a backpack — these are surely shared memories for many Hong Kong-born-and-raised people.
Coca-Cola museums
Coca-Cola’s promotions have come in endless varieties, with frequent brand crossovers — beyond the Demae Iccho and Monopoly tie-ins seen among the exhibits, Coke cans around the world have carried designs featuring other partners, from fashion brands to film characters, actors and singers.
Schools once arranged visits to the Swire bottling plant so that primary pupils could learn how soft drinks are made. But the Swire Coca-Cola Hong Kong museum in Fo Tan, home to nearly 2,000 exhibits, closed for renovation in 2019 and is not expected to reopen until late 2021 at the earliest. To learn more about the history of Coca-Cola in Hong Kong, look out for the Swire Coca-Cola HK pop-up stores held from time to time, or consult the material online (https://scchkpop-upstore.com/). If you are interested in Coca-Cola museums elsewhere, see the links below.
Sources:
Swire Coca-Cola HK Pop-up Store at The Mills, Tsuen Wan, 31 August 2020
Museum at the US headquarters: https://www.worldofcoca-cola.com/
Swire Coca-Cola Hong Kong website — heritage https://www.coca-cola.hk/heritage
World of Coca-Cola — Taiwan museum http://pavilion.coke.com.tw/
https://www.lcsd.gov.hk/CE/Museum/History//zh_TW/web/mh/exhibition/current.html
“Striving and Transforming: The History of Hong Kong Industry” exhibition at the Hong Kong Museum of History
https://hkindustry2020.com/QR.php?id=2
Swire Coca-Cola https://www.swirecocacola.com/tc/About-Us/Our-History.html
太古之道 : 太古在華一百五十年 (The Taikoo Way: 150 Years of Swire in China)
by 鍾寶賢 (Chung Po-yin)
First Hong Kong edition, Hong Kong: Joint Publishing (H.K.), 2016
厚生與創業 : 維他奶 (一九四零至一九九零) (Nourishment and Enterprise: Vitasoy, 1940–1990)
by 蔡寶瓊 (Choi Po-king)
Hong Kong: The Hong Kong Soya Bean Products Co., Ltd., 1990
Published in Sep 2020 by Hong Kong Brand Museum 香港品牌博物館